The Beautiful American (36 page)

“Hard years. But I got some good work done. I, too, survived.” Pablo leaned back and studied the sky, tilting his head so that his Adam’s apple jutted out, sharp and dangerous looking.

“Where is Man?” I asked. “I didn’t think I should mention him in front of Roland.”

“If money is the root of all evil, then jealousy is the root of all emotion. Where would art be without it? But in this marriage, the shoe is on the other foot. Lee is jealous of Roland. He insists on certain rights, including the right to roam and keep a mistress.” Pablo puffed on his pipe and made a face at the sheep grazing steadily closer, oblivious to us.

Pablo would know something about that, the keeping of mistresses.

“Man,” he said, speaking without mirth, “is in California, with rich people and moviemakers. The women are very pretty, but I think he doesn’t like it there. He is famous here, in England and France, not in California. But he had the sense to leave Paris before the deportations began, the trains to the camps.”

“Good thing,” I said. Man, with his Semitic features, his outspokenness, would have been spotted instantly, and we knew what had happened to those Jews who had stayed. They had been rounded up into a sports stadium, the Vel d’Hiver, and from there taken to the camps.

“Madame Hughes?” he asked.

This was a ritual we all went through after the war, checking lists, finding out who had survived, what had happened to whom.

“Quietly, in her sleep. A year after she lost her son, Nicky.” That pain again, always coming when I thought I was dead to emotion. Nicky in the sunny Nice morning, pulling my toes to wake me up.

“She must have been quite old. Is it good to see Lee again?” Pablo asked. “You were close friends, weren’t you?”

“When you are twenty and in Paris for the first time, I think
there is no such thing as a close friend. I was all eyes and ears, all sensation, so busy taking everything in, there was little to give out.”

There had been so much to experience, so much that gave enchantment to a life transformed, the steep narrow cobbled streets that Jamie and I slid down on icy winter days, the ornate Bishops’ Fountain of St. Sulpice where we held hands and talked about the future, the bookstalls near Notre-Dame where we bought French schoolbooks to improve our grammar.

Pablo laughed. “That was how I was, my first years in Paris, that young boy from Andalusia. Paris was where everything happened, everything was new. Home was boring. Nothing changed. Paris was the magnet, the center. Was it like that for you?”

“At my home, things did change, but for the worse.”

“A death,” he guessed. “Children are more moved by death than adults, even when they don’t show it. A sibling? Mother or father? Maybe the first love.”

“My father.”

He took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket, and a packet of papers, and rolled a cigarette.

“I think it will rain,” he said, striking a match. I inhaled, noting the smell of ozone in the air, the sulfur of his match.

He leaned back on his elbow and stared up again at the glooming sky where the blue-tinged clouds bumped into one another. We seemed to have run out of conversation.

“How are Olga, Paulo, and Marie-Thérèse?” I asked.

He exhaled smoke through his nostrils and didn’t reply for a long enough time that I knew I had made an error. He finally answered in a neutral voice. “They are well, I assume. I haven’t seen Olga and Paulo in a while. I have a daughter now, Maya, with
Marie-Thérèse. But tell me, how does Lee seem to you?” Pablo turned those piercing black eyes on me.

“Happy,” I said. “Because of the child. Because of Roland.” That was the polite answer, of course. One day with Lee and Roland and I could see the chinks in the wall of their marriage.

“Roland thinks she is fragile. Emotional. She saw terrible things in the war and afterwards.” Pablo puffed a perfect smoke ring.

“The camps.”

“And the battles. She went where women hadn’t gone before, and I think she will pay the price for a long time.”

I thought of her hand in the tearoom, tapping, incessantly tapping on the table. She was drinking even more than I remembered.

“She took too many chances, went too far,” Pablo said. “Her nerves are ruined. She destroyed herself, not for her art, but to prove something. I don’t know what.”

In my mind’s eye I saw Lee, the little girl, climbing to the top of the tree. After the rape, she had climbed even higher. The rape. I thought of Dahlia and Bonner, and had to put my head into my hands so that Pablo would not see my face. The whispering wind quickened and the whole field became alive with an invisible destroying hand.

“The world has changed, you see it,” Pablo said. “We change with it. When we move from a state in which we believe, know, we could die at any minute, to a new state where we see long, sometimes boring years ahead of us, that changes us dramatically. Matadors don’t live long after they retire from the ring. The ennui kills them. I wonder if Lee will become bored with motherhood.”

Pablo did not ask about my child. Had he forgotten I left Paris pregnant?

The first drops of rain began to fall. Pablo rose to his feet with
a stiff, pained movement. Sciatica, I thought. Omar had a touch of it as well. Pablo tucked his sketchbook into his shirt, offered me his hand, and we ran over the fields, back to Farley Farm.

When I went into my room to dry my hair, Lee was there, sitting on the bed and holding the new green dress in her hands.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “Will you wear it tonight? We’ll have a dress-up affair.”

I took it from her and put it back on its hanger. “It was silly of me to bring it.”

“Not at all. I still love a chance to dress up. Combat boots and a fatigue jacket do get old. I’ll do your hair for you. Just like old times.”

Had she done my hair in the old times? Not that I could remember. The notion had a sisterly ring to it and such familiar intimacy had never existed between us. Memories were often faulty. Did Lee remember events that had never happened, or was I disremembering something that had?

God, I was so tired, so full of questions for which there were no answers. “I have a—,” I started to say. I was going to tell her about Dahlia.

Before I could finish the sentence, lightning streaked the sky. Thunder boomed and rattled the windowpanes.

Lee turned pale. We were an entire generation that would jump at loud noises for many years after the war.

“I’d better go check the windows,” Lee said, jumping up. “I used to love thunderstorms, back in Poughkeepsie. Dad and I would watch them on the back porch, huddled under an old blanket. One year a gardener planted a vine on the porch, and Dad had to tear it down so we could see the sky. I’ll tell Roland dinner will be formal, and see if I can scare up a tablecloth.”

•   •   •

T
he rest of the day passed slowly with a constant murmuring of low voices, the occasional burst of music when someone thought to put a disc on the phonograph. We moved from room to room, window to window, glowering back at the glowering sky, carrying candles with us because the day turned dark long before sunset came.

Farley Farm felt haunted to me. So many presences of people who weren’t really there: Jamie, Man, my father, whom I hadn’t thought about so much for years. Being with Lee again, remembering her father, put me in mind of my own, how he smelled of peat moss and soap, the grime under his nails, his puzzled smile, as if life was something incomprehensible to him.

He would take discarded houseplants—geraniums, Christmas poinsettia, African violets—from the Miller trash and bring them back to life in our house, so that my mother complained of living in a jungle. He had been so pleased with the trumpet vine he planted in front of Mr. Miller’s back porch that when he found it torn up, he brought a piece of root back home for our own small porch. Every summer after that, we had to duck through a fountain of orange flowers to get in the house.

Chicken again for dinner, but that night Lee cooked and instead of Roland’s simple roast she served a casserole of chicken and potatoes in a red wine sauce, with a side dish of pureed spinach and pickled onions.

“I’ve taken up cooking,” Lee announced, putting the platter on the table with a grand flourish. “This is the new me, the domestic little housewife.” She gloated a bit as she served us, giving that satisfied smile, that slight tilt of the head to the side.

Roland blew her a kiss from his end of the table and pulled out my chair for me, formal as if we were at the Ritz, though water dripped into a pan in a corner of the room from a ceiling leak. Rain beat against the windows.

We all sat around the rickety table, dressed to the nines. I wasn’t the only one who had tucked evening clothes into her valise. Lee wore a colorful silk caftan, very exotic looking and lovely. She had been photographed in it when she was pregnant with baby Anthony, she announced, and had gotten used to the comfort of a loose dress.

The two girls, Lisa and Carmen, wore similar dresses, wasp-waisted and cut very low in front. Lesley wore her good gray suit with a fresh blouse. Pablo wore a shirt instead of his usual sailor jersey.

“To a bevy of beauties,” Roland said, raising his glass. Lisa and Carmen giggled with pleasure, and again there was that strange sensation that the past sixteen years and all their events had never happened. I was young and in Paris, awed by my surroundings, by my acquaintances.

The moment passed, and I was older, cold with English damp, aching for a lost child. We picked up our knives and forks. I pretended to eat.

“You went for a walk with Pablo today,” Lisa said with a little pout.

“No. I went alone for a walk.”

“You didn’t come back alone.”

Pablo leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest, smiling. He liked to be fought over, liked to be the center of attention. That was what Paris had felt like: all those famous people or people about to become famous, each a sun demanding that the other planets orbit around him. There had been noisy collisions.

I concentrated on my plate, trying to stay out of the way of so many egos. That was how I had survived in Paris, until I was no longer a survivor: kept out of the way, remained invisible, didn’t draw attention to myself.

“You are like a barn cat,” Pablo had said to me once, early during the time in Paris. “Staying near enough to people to get their scraps, the safety of their homes, but not letting them get close to you.”

“More chicken, Nora?” Roland asked, offering to serve me. “We bought two, today. Everyone can have seconds.”

“Oh, poor little chickens,” said Lisa. “I’ll have more, thanks.”

And, of course, we drank. Bottles and bottles of wine, and when the food was gone, brandy, sitting in front of the stove, each of us in a different stage of inebriation, leaning against one another for warmth, legs spread out or crossed tailor-style. We looked like a group of refugees who hadn’t had time to change into practical clothing.

Lisa wound up the gramophone again and did a strange dance by herself, singing along to “Stormy Weather.” Pablo watched, his eyes moving back and forth, drawing her with the pencil of his imagination. Lee and Roland cuddled together, he whispering into her ear, she looking occasionally toward the stairs, obviously thinking about the nursery at the top of them, and Anthony in his bed, sleeping.

Carmen leaned against Pablo, offering herself, trying to make herself irresistible. While Roland made the names of artists, Pablo made the names of models. I was back in the world where everybody wanted something, where all friendships, all loves, were part of an unspoken business arrangement, and even a world war hadn’t changed that.

“So, who are you, really?” Carmen asked, catching me watching her.

“A fair enough question,” Roland said. “More from our mystery guest.”

“She’s an old acquaintance of mine,” Lee said.

“That’s hardly enough for an identity,” Roland said, and Lee blinked at the reprimand.

“I think she’s a pianist. Look at her hands. Someone about to have a recital in Marseille or somewhere else in the south,” Pablo teased. I held up my hands. They were brown and slightly freckled, too small to reach even a single octave.

“I think she’s someone’s ex-wife. A retired artist’s model with a good divorce settlement,” Carmen guessed.

“No,” said Lee. “She’s not wearing a diamond bracelet. All ex-wives have diamond bracelets.” She held up her own, an extravagant gift from Aziz, and it seemed to me that Roland put a little space between himself and his wife, and that Lee made a surreptitious movement of her own to close that gap.

Well, if they wanted a game, I would give them one. “All wrong. But I’ll give you a hint. Carmen, your perfume is Evening in Paris. And Lisa, you have borrowed Carmen’s perfume.”

“Have you? I never said you could!” Carmen shrieked, then remembered Pablo next to her and decided for a calmer approach. “You might ask, next time,” she said sweetly.

“A nose,” Roland guessed quietly.

“No. But I do work in the perfume industry.” Each house had one nose, the person who created new fragrances, and they were trained from childhood. I had started too late, and was a foreigner, so that highest position had been impossible for me. But I had composed a few private commissions, one for Natalia that had smelled
of Russian tea, one for Madame LaRosa that smelled of the salt and moss fragrance of Normandy.

“And do you make private perfumes for the rich and famous?” Carmen yawned.

“No. Not for the rich and famous. Only a couple of friends.”

The stove in Lee’s drawing room made a strange hissing sound. The rain had stopped, but the wind had picked up and the house moaned and shivered around us.

“I’ll get more wood,” Roland said. “Maybe there’s a wet piece in there. Lee, I’ve told you not to chuck in damp wood.” He had been frowning ever since Lee had held up her diamond bracelet for show.

“You loaded the stove, my sweet. Not me,” Lee said, and the atmosphere changed from friendly to something more hostile. Pablo gave me a knowing look.

“So how do you and Lee know each other, then?” Carmen asked. “She’s so . . .” Even dense, flirtatious Carmen had the sense not to finish that sentence, but it finished itself in my head. She was so beautiful. So famous. And I was a nobody.